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Ghosts of Gezi

Photographs by Pari Dukovic

Introduction by Raffi Khatchadourian

There was the crassness of the idea: to build a kitschy shopping mall in a reconstituted Ottoman military barracks, in the middle of Istanbul’s treasured Gezi Park. There was the whiff of cronyism in it, too. There was the obstinate micromanagement from the office of the Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who appeared unable to fathom that people might not want a kitschy shopping mall instead of a park. (His reaction to a national-heritage board that rejected the plan was typical: “I reject your rejection.”) Then, there were those initial days when a handful of people tried to prevent earthmoving equipment from uprooting Gezi’s sycamores. There was the courageous member of parliament who threw himself in front of the machines, and the tent city that sprang up to house protesters who refused to leave. Eventually, as might be expected, the police came, with pepper spray and fire and truncheons, beating and blasting people and burning down tents. As the protesters grew in number, to more than two million across the country, the police swarmed, shooting more than a hundred thousand cannisters of tear gas—at times directly at people, like bullets. Police roamed Istanbul in boxy white trucks armed with water cannons. They had little time for food or sleep, and in their exhaustion they argued over their tactics, which ultimately caused thousands of injuries and half a dozen deaths. Soon enough, the excessive force became a far more urgent object of protest. The atmosphere grew more intense, but there were moments of release: ballroom dancing in Taksim Square, communal feasts, fireworks, street theatre. An artist stood at attention for eight hours, and hundreds of people emulated him. Istanbul’s governor announced to the protesters, “I wish I were among you,” even as he was clearly assisting the police effort. Soccer fans built barricades from urban debris. Journalists were everywhere and nowhere. During the initial violence, CNN Türk aired a documentary about penguins—an act of self-censorship that further fuelled the demonstrations, as people believed their grievances and their hopes were being written out of existence. And for more than two weeks in May and June the country seemed to be engulfed in unrest.

A year later, the fight for Gezi still looms over Turkish politics. The public discontent has not ebbed. Neither have the autocratic state reflexes or the conviction of Erdoğan’s supporters. Last winter, there was news of secret wiretap recordings—apparently of Erdoğan, his son, and members of his inner circle, all of them implicated in corruption. Homes were searched, and people were arrested. Erdoğan called the recordings a fabrication, and responded with a lecture: “Listening to my phone is forbidden.” He launched a self-acknowledged “witch hunt,” in which thousands of government employees were reassigned. He banned Twitter. He banned YouTube. He unbanned Twitter, under court order, then interfered with its service. There were more demonstrations. And in March the spectre of Gezi returned: a fifteen-year-old boy named Berkin Elvan, who had been shot in the head with a cannister of tear gas, died, after two hundred and sixty-nine days in a coma. His parents said that he was going out to buy bread the morning he was shot. Erdoğan, unmoved, insisted that he was a terrorist, “hurling steel marbles with the slingshot in his hand.” On Mother’s Day, Erdoğan added another detail, that the boy had explosives in his pocket: “Who would go to buy bread with a mask, a slingshot, and explosives?” At the funeral, people held loaves of bread in Elvan’s memory. Some were arrested.

It wasn’t so long ago that Erdoğan was a different kind of politician. In the nineteen-nineties, as mayor of Istanbul, he spoke of “unity and tolerance.” He was a moderate Islamist—a minority position in a country whose leaders seek to impose majority rule, often absolutely. For decades, a secularist Old Guard in the tradition of Kemal Atatürk owned the winner-take-all arena of Turkish politics; the Army monitored and disciplined elected leaders, orchestrating coups when they strayed. Erdoğan understood what it meant to be on the blunt end of that kind of power. In 1999, after publicly quoting a line of poetry—“the mosques are our barracks / the domes our helmets / the minarets our bayonets / and the faithful our soldiers”—he was imprisoned for inciting “religious hatred.” His jail time was brief, four months, but the sense of victimhood never dissipated. Before he was taken away, tens of thousands of protesters turned up at his Istanbul office, and he promised them, “We will have justice and human rights one day.”

As Prime Minister, Erdoğan has transformed Turkey. He smashed the Army’s corrupting role in politics. He initiated a peace process with the P.K.K., the Kurdish militant group that fought the state for decades. He advanced free expression, helped pass universal health care, and abolished the final vestiges of the death penalty. Then the Prime Minister’s office began to transform Erdoğan. He became intolerant of dissent, and cultivated a climate of fear; Turkey now imprisons more journalists than any other country. He built patronage networks, enmeshing politics and business to augment his influence. And, just as Atatürk once banned the fez, he and his party, in small ways, have attempted to dictate private habits: limiting the sale of alcohol, urging women to have more children, expressing displeasure with public kissing. The Turkish constitution is a relic of an old junta; along with needed reforms, Erdoğan has advocated an “executive Presidency,” an office that he no doubt wants to fill. If power in Turkey once served a brittle statist ideology, it now appears to serve a personal agenda: Erdoğan’s rule. Feeding on his animosity during the Gezi protests, his followers begged for permission to “crush” the citizens encamped at the park. “Let us go!” they demanded at a rally, chanting, “Minority, do not be confused, do not test our patience.”

The protests, in the truest sense, were about undoing the logic of majority domination. For many Turks, Erdoğan—with his street-tough manner, his white-hot temper, and his baroque political conspiracies (where all opponents are secretly plotting treason)—has extended that logic to the point of tragicomic caricature. Two weeks ago, when hundreds of miners perished near the town of Soma, Erdoğan rushed to the scene, and offered a bizarrely defensive lecture—as if the deaths were a personal affront. Protesters called him a murderer. They kicked his car. Erdoğan, in turn, called them immoral and impertinent. Policemen pinned a relative of one of the deceased to the ground, and a senior Erdoğan adviser ran over to kick him. Erdoğan was mobbed. “If you boo the country’s Prime Minister, you get slapped,” he warned. At a supermarket, his guards pushed people away, and, amid the chaos, Erdoğan lashed out and hit a man in the crowd.

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On-site production by Selin Maria BarlasTranslations by Sibel Horada and Pari Dukovic